"That" being a job that crops up once a year round about this time, although if the experience of the past two or three years is repeated, I need not have done it for another three or four months.
When we bought our holiday home in France the intention was that we should let it out as a way of covering some of the standing expenses involved in owning a second home. As well as advertising in newspapers and magazines (which we have since stopped) and on one or another holiday cottage web sites, we also set up our own web site. I say "we" set it up but actually it was I who did it and it is I who maintains it. At some time during the years that we have owned Les Lavandes (the name of our French home) it occurred to me that many of our guests might prefer to pay by credit or debit card rather than posting cheques to us. Arranging that is basically quite simple, even for a technobabe like me. I signed up for a PayPal account and set up a page on the web site where people booking could pay the deposit for the week or weeks they were booking by clicking a button for each week. Then I had to produce another page for people to pay the balance. Every year those pages have to be copied and the dates amended for the following year. Sounds simple? Actually, it isn't difficult - but it does need concentration. Altering the dates of the weeks to be booked is quick enough and easy but altering the dates in the HTML code for PayPal is a much more finicky operation, and one that has to be done twice, first for the deposit and then for the balance. Then there are tweaks that need to be made in other places on the web site. It is quite usual for me to remember one I had overlooked some hours after I think I have finished the job - this week it was as I was cleaning my teeth before bed. I think it's done now.
I wrote at the start that I need not have done the job for several months. Way back when we started out, we were getting enquiries - and the occasional booking - during October and November for the following summer. That doesn't seem to be the case now. Indeed, this year we were getting enquiries only a couple of weeks before people wanted to go on holiday. Our experience is that people are leaving it until almost the last minute before booking holidays. Is this something to do with the precarious financial circumstances we all seem to be living in or could there be some other reason?
Anyway, if you are curious you can see what our holiday home is like by checking out the web site for Les Lavandes.
1 comment:
Finances, I would say. One of my brothers-in-law has a house in Spain with her girlfriend and their daughter and they let it out in the summer (it gets too hot) and come to live in the UK. In later years they've struggled to find punters and like you said, only at the last minute someone turns up with the cash in hand.
Greetings from - a very warm - London.
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